Word: crosspatch
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Obituaries of Travers--who died last week at 96, and whose real name was Helen Lyndon Goff--invariably (though respectfully) depicted her as a curmudgeonly grouch with a tendency to be "fierce" and "short" with her interlocutors, a woman who didn't "suffer fools gladly," a regular old crosspatch. They all recounted the rounded, well-traveled life she had led. (Before writing the first Mary Poppins book, she had been variously a dancer, a poet, a journalist, a theater critic and a Shakespearean actress.) Still, the implication that seemed to lurk behind the articles about Travers was that she hadn...